A line-interleaved image sensor exposes odd rows and even rows of a pixel array for different intervals, one long and one short, to capture dark and bright parts of a scene. Pixel data is read out from both sets of rows at the conclusion of a frame interval and merged into a high dynamic range (HDR) image. Unfortunately, the short exposure tends to be noisy, yielding motion-induced artifacts (as it is difficult distinguish scene motion from noise) and noisy bright regions in the final image.